The phone in Tony White’s office rang one day, and when SDSU’s recruiting coordinator picked up, the kid on the other end of the line introduced himself this way:

“Coach, I’m a four-star linebacker. I’ve got 27 offers, and I want to go to San Diego State.”

A four-star linebacker who wants to come to SDSU?

You’d think the Aztecs would have doled out a scholarship on the spot.

Actually, no.

“What’s your name?” the coach asked.

“He tells me his name, we go look up the film, and we’re like, ‘No, you don’t fit in with what we do,’” White said.

Wait. What?

Yup, the Aztecs turned down a four-star kid. They turned down a bunch of interested three-star kids, too.

But don’t panic, really. Rocky Long hasn’t lost his mind. When it comes to recruiting, there’s a method to the madness.

The Aztecs are used to doing more with less — both in terms of recruiting budget and the caliber of player they could hope to lure to a non-Pac-12 school that, until very recently, had gone more than a decade without making a bowl game.

So the staff figured out pretty early on that it didn’t make sense for them to blindly pursue every highly rated kid being courted by every other program.

“A lot of the guys focus on the same 200 to 300 players in the country,” White said. “But there’s thousands of players. As long as people are rating the same 200 to 300 guys in the country, you let those guys fight it out. We’ll take these other guys and develop them and win championships.”

The buzzword White spouts is “mold.”

As in, “We have a mold of a player that we want to bring in. If they don’t fit our mold, we ain’t gonna take them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a four or five star.

“We like football players. Football has become so specialized, you get guys who aren’t gonna just go out and play street ball. You get a guy who’s a running back, and he’s only played running back and only gone to camps as a running back.

“We’ve got to find football players. A lot of our guys ... played one thing in high school and ended up playing something else here.”

Exhibit A: Leon McFadden, a receiver in high school who badly wanted to play wide receiver for the Aztecs.

Exhibit B: Gavin Escobar, also a high school receiver who made the coaches salivate at the thought of moving the 6-foot-5, 210-pounder with soft hands to tight end.

That’s what the Aztecs coaches make their living on: Identifying raw talent and being able to accurately project where a kid can maximize his position at the next level.

The trend continued in this year’s recruiting class.

Of the 24 recruits SDSU pulled in on Signing Day last week, nine will be asked to play a position they did not play in high school.

White believes that’s how the Aztecs have steadily improved their talent level over the last few years — they’ll take a flyer on a running back who might not be quite as fast or big enough to attract the attention of the big-time programs. They’ll identify how the kid’s natural skills could fit elsewhere and see if he’s willing to make the switch.